Her Name Had Been Louise
by vikung-fu
Summary: They trod a fine line, he realised, being all the way out here. He wondered how his actions would have been perceived had they been on Earth, and then it struck him that through the grime and dust, this place could almost be Earth. Discussion of an implied relationship between Kirk and Miri.


**Her Name Had Been Louise**

It took him a moment to realise he was holding the tricorder too firmly, that his grasp was too tight. Staring out through the grime of the window, the layers of dust and memory that covered everything here, he thought again of the dead girl, the bluish hue of her face, the lavender of her bruises, and the wild unkempt tangles of her hair.

A _woodwose_ they would have called her long ago, a wild woman, a maenad—and yet, like the Cheshire Cat had told Alice, they were all mad here; mad from sadness, mad from wildness, mad from the disease that had killed anyone who could have taught them better.

He had never known her—_Louise_, her name had been—but he did know Miri; Miri, with her warm smile and her cheerful innocence, and his feelings were conflicted over this. James Kirk was an adult, he understood what these feelings she expressed so readily to him were—and yet the heart of a girl who had grown up with no adults to explain to her what adult relationships were caused him to recoil from her, to draw back with caution, to hold her at arm's length. It was clear that Miri could _consent_ to a relationship, but she could not understand, and the ferocity of her feelings scared him, not because he had never had to deal with teenage infatuation before, but because she was simultaneously a child and the oldest woman he knew.

Still holding the tricorder firmly in his grasp, James Kirk felt that he had spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks failing women. McCoy had been direct in regards to the first instance of his guilt.

'_Jim_,' the older man had said, one eyebrow raised, his posture always seemingly one step away from a volatile outburst, '_Jim, you can't call that thing a woman. She was an automaton, a plaything, one of Korby's pet projects_.' And yet for all his pretend fury, McCoy had still used female pronouns when referring to her, the android, Andrea, beautiful and beguiling, dressed in next to nothing.

There were simulacra on Earth too, he recalled, Korby had not been original or inventive when it came to the advancement of that technology. His own childhood had been punctuated by the occasional interaction with earlier models, _shoshinsha marks_ still apparent on their synthetic skin despite the years since their manufacture. Yet all of these machines were notable, clearly identifiable. When he had first met Andrea, when he had first met the duplicate of Dr Brown, when he had seen his own doppelgänger, he had not been able to tell.

'_There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen_,' Shelley had written, so many years ago.

Kirk found it difficult to tell whether the good doctor was outraged from a professional standpoint, whether he was upset at the insult of such mimicry of human life from the position of a surgeon, or whether he was outraged that Korby had used Christine Chapel and her prior relationship with him as a means of attempting to get what he wanted.

And yet wasn't that what he himself was doing to Miri? Wasn't he using how Miri felt about him to further his own agenda? But this was different, he told himself, lives were at stake, he couldn't afford to be concerned with the folly of a girl's heart when the lives of his crew—

A _girl_. A _child_.

They trod a fine line, he realised, being all the way out here. He wondered how his actions would have been perceived had they been on Earth, and then it struck him that through the grime and dust, this place could _almost_ be Earth, albeit a poor reflection; through a mirror darkly, as St Paul had once written. If the manner of his relationship with Miri was something he would be ashamed of on Earth, then surely it was something to be ashamed of here, on this almost-Earth, this world so like his own and yet so arrested, like its populace, on the cusp of adolescence.

The people here had been cruel and vindictive, just as the people from his own world had once been, just as Korby himself had been in his attempts to replicate life. Was this some kind of cosmic mockery or was this a deeper truth as to how the universe worked, the constant comparison between ideals, going back and forth until those buried deep within the valleys, those who were not afforded a bird's eye view of the patterns, were suddenly made aware of the patterns.

He was a good man, he told himself, he had not always made the right choices but he had always had the right intention. Wasn't that enough?

Standing at that window, he already knew the answer. He had a duty of care to Miri certainly, but he had a greater responsibility to his crew. This was part of being a captain, he told himself, sometimes you have to weigh up—

"Excuses," he said softly, chiding himself.

And they were, just as they had been before, just as they would be again.

He sensed her at his back rather than heard her.

"Jim," she said softly, "Jim, is there something else you would like me to do?"

Slowly, he turned to her, his smile sad and tremulous; slowly, he made his reply.


End file.
